Hope amid ruins

The day the Gaza ceasefire finally arrived

Bethan McKernan

From a ridge on the western edge of Sderot, the ruins of Gaza loom. Less than a kilometre separates the Israeli town and the outskirts of the Palestinian territory, but after 471 days of war, the other side of the fence from Sderot’s shrubby green dunes resembles a dystopian parallel universe. A few minutes before a long-awaited ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict was supposed to begin at 8.30am local time last Sunday, the morning quiet was shattered by an Israeli airstrike on Beit Hanoun, the Gaza town visible from the ridge. The Guardian last visited Beit Hanoun three days before the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The area’s orchards were full of guava and the last of the season’s pomegranates. In the fields, though, something unusual was…

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Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 24 January 2025

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